Mendeley to the rescue

I’ve had a lovely time this morning with a person responsible for building and maintaining the website and publications lists for her department.

We worked out how she wanted them displayed, and then the fun began. The main thing was to avoid lots of hand-typed, static lists of articles – what she wanted to to be able to display the articles and books by each member of the department, and also the teams’ “produce” each year, divided by books and articles.

We were able to suck references from pubmed, copac etc into Mendeley, assign them to at least 2 groups each (author and year) and then embed the results sets of articles in the webpages.

What we also wanted to have was the table update with the details of new articles easily (rather than editing the whole set again). Mendeley can do that too – everytime you suck new details from pubmed into one of your existing groups the webpage where it is embedded will update.

for an example of what the end result can look like see this… – not a beautiful thing, but I’m sure you get the gist (you can alter the size of the box to suit you webpage – I was just too excited at seeing it embeded to get round to that, plus it’s just an experiment, not the real thing). As new articles are added to the mendeley collection, the list will update automatically on your page.

And you can still use mendeley for all the other things it can do, like “cite while you write” and file management, plus it lets you annotate PDF documents! amazing things!

This is a really good use of RSS feeds in a library, I think. I’ve played with Mendeley a little bit but need to set aside some time to explore it further. Looking forward to the “proper” tour in Week 10 of Cam23!

Well, who’d’a’thought it? Result! After only an hour I have managed to drop a Mendeley pubs feed into a test page. One of those ‘Bloody hell! I actually did it! [even though I haven’t a clue how]’ moments. Must say, though, that finding out how to do things on the Mendeley website is not desperately easy. I do like Mendeley, but have such trouble getting it to do what it says it will do.
Need to find out how to reduce size of feed and update automatically now, but for this afternoon, time to bask in the Eureka moment

If anyone needs assistance getting these collections to display, I’m happy to help. To reduce the size of the feed, go to the collection’s page on Mendeley, click “Embed on other websites” and then “Customize”.

You can also modify the display style by editing the code. 300px and 450px are the default height and width, respectively. (hopefully the example code from one of my collections will display properly below):